Duveen quickly became decorator, designer, architect, and purveyor of tasteful art, porcelain, furniture, rugs, and anything else that was required to set the table and stage for the highest standards of living by this aspiring class. Early in his career he recognized a burgeoning market in America with its increasing number of millionaires who desired the type of life that bespoke long family lines of wealth and titles, and the lifestyles they had seen in the country estates and grand city houses of Britain and the Continent. Joseph Duveen personified taste, charm, and a sense of style that was irresistible. Under Joseph’s extravagant personality and guidance, with his father and uncle’s help, Joseph opened additional branches of the firm of Duveen in Paris and New York (Fig. 5), who had inherited the firm as a small but successful family business dealing in art that had begun with his father, Joel, when he came from Meppel, in Holland, to London, in 1866. The House of Duveen, as it was often called by its employees, was largely the success of Joseph Duveen (Fig. In purchasing the Duveen stock, Simon was acquiring the contents of a gallery that, more than any other, had influenced the way Americans collected art, and some of whose clients had gone on to found the nation’s foremost public and private museums, including the National Gallery of Art, The Frick Collection, and the Huntington Library and Art Collections. But there comes a time when a collector of this caliber realizes that their acquisitions will outlast them, and so begin to contemplate the future. His initial foray into collecting came when, like other famous collectors-Getty, Huntington, Frick, Morgan, and Gardner, among them-he wanted to outfit his home and corporate offices with art that reflected his newfound wealth. 2: Edward Fowles in his Parisian house (the former residence of World War I General Joseph Joffre). 4), far afield from his more obscure days as a tomato and orange juice canning magnate.įig. Was it the sheer need to possess a thing of beauty? Or was he more interested in art as an investment? Juxtaposed with his purchase of one year later-Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Boy (originally thought to be an image of the artist’s son Titus)-it is impossible not to think that Simon was enjoying his newfound notoriety as one of the major players on the art market (Fig. Speculation remains regarding Simon’s drive to own art. With this single action, he and his foundations became the owners of more than 800 objects of art he was only familiar with fewer than twenty of the works. The Duveen acquisition must have been tantalizing for someone like Simon. Simon was a keen observer of the business of running a museum, and he was already displaying his prowess as a master of negotiations with art dealers and at auctions. His close ties to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he was a member of the board, as well as speculation that he would build a museum in Fullerton, California, where his company was headquartered, are faint signs that his drive to amass a collection of art was not only for his own personal gratification. Simon had been collecting art-primarily nineteenth-century paintings-for a decade, and had neither the space nor the staff to undertake such a major acquisition. 2) to purchase the legendary Duveen Brothers Gallery, including its massive stock of decorative arts, paintings, and sculpture, as well as its important library and stately galleries at East 79th Street in Manhattan (Fig. 1) signed an agreement with Edward Fowles (Fig. One wonders what his thoughts were when, in 1965, Norton Simon (Fig. 1: Norton Simon, 1952, Norton Simon Museum Archives.
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